Through 2007, the Linux market will surpass $9 billion in revenue, approaching 18 percent of total shipped revenues on an initial acquisition basis (0.8 probability).

Linux sales will tend toward high-volume, low-priced commodity platform shipments, as opposed to heavily configured (that is, with large memory, CPUs and attached storage) systems of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems (0.8 probability). Even with the emergence of rack-mounted blades or SMP-configured server area networks in a frame, systems that exploit Linux will mostly be deployed in traditional or next-generation front-end Web and application environments of distributed systems. Thus, during the next three years, Linux will be a cost-effective surround-style deployment at the network's and enterprise's edge with deeper enterprise usage emerging from 2005.